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Contributors’ Notes
Hussain Ahmed is a Nigerian poet and environmentalist. His poems and translations are featured or forthcoming in
Poetry,
AzonaL,
Sara Backer’s first book of poetry,
Such Luck (Flowstone Press, 2019), follows two poetry chapbooks:
Scavenger Hunt (dancing girl press, 2018) and
Bicycle Lotus (Left Fork, 2015). Her honors include the 2019 Plough Poetry Prize competition, eight Pushcart nominations, and fellowships from the Norton Island and Djerassi Resident Artists Programs. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts, lives in New Hampshire, and reads for the
Maine Review. Point,
Marianne Boruch’s tenth book of poetry is
The Anti-Grief (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). She has written three essay collections about poetry, most recently
Marianne Boruch
Marianne Boruch, photo by David Dunlap
Sarah Wolfson talks with Marianne Boruch about the platypus, Pliny, and the discovery lurking in “the spill of words.” Read “The Lyrebird Hidden…” and “Every Available Blue…” in
NER 42.1.
Sarah Wolfson: These poems are part of your forthcoming book,
Bestiary Dark, a project you launched as a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the University of Canberra’s International Poetry Studies Institute. The purpose of your research was to observe Australian wildlife in order to write a bestiary. How did you first become interested in the bestiary genre?
Marianne Boruch: Is it an honest-to-Zeus
the library lectures-on-tape (Daily Life in the Ancient World)
however fog-socked-in shattered day of arrival.
But arrival: that would be
the Present waitin for a Future to soothe from Is the Past What s Left in the Glove Compartment, Volume 61, Issue 3 (Fall 2020)
Tell us about one of the first pieces you wrote.
A very simple one about eating eggs for breakfast. Not the first I ve ever written, but the piece about which I suddenly thought: my god, this is a poem! Which is to say, it looked back at me. It had its own secret life, could stand up for itself. I wasn t trying to xerox something that happened or make a sweetened scrapbook of some moment of my life. That was a happy shock to me, its self-sufficiency.